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Romance Fades, Partnership Endures

WHEN it became apparent that Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the founding members of the Swell Season, were in love, many felt as if they had watched it happen.

In “Once,” a movie from 2007 directed by John Carney and made in Ireland both for and about a song, Mr. Hansard, then the lead singer-songwriter of the Irish rock group the Frames, played a hard-luck busker who has been even less lucky in love. He and the character played by Ms. Irglova, a Czech immigrant street vendor and pianist, pivot around each other musically and personally to remarkable effect. On a promotional tour for the film, the line between their characters and their real lives evaporated. They fell in love.

They had known each other since Mr. Hansard, touring with his band, first visited Ms. Irglova’s hometown, Valasske Mezirici in the Czech Republic, when she was 13. Having heard her play while visiting her parents, he called her up onstage to sing a song. A casual collaboration that began when she was still a teenager became more serious after Mr. Hansard invited her to tour the United States with him. And over time the age difference — he is now 39 and she is 21 — seemed to evaporate. Their song “Falling Slowly,” the centerpiece of the film, provided an aching, yearning blueprint of how they came together, and it went on to win an Academy Award for best song in 2008.

For Mr. Hansard it was not the first go-round with movie magic — he played a band member in “The Commitments” in 1991 — but he felt incredibly sheepish about it. When “Once” hit the cinematic lotto — the film was made for about $150,000 and grossed $20 million worldwide — he embraced the opportunity. The Swell Season, which had been conceived as a side project, suddenly became a far bigger band than the Frames had ever been. The “Once” soundtrack was certified gold, selling more than 700,000 copies, and the band played for ever-growing crowds, including a sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall in 2008.

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Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard at the High Line park in Manhattan in August.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

“Finding that person that you can bounce off of — that will make you better than anything you can do alone — is a great moment,” Mr. Hansard said of his partner in a recent interview.

The pair could not be more different. Mr. Hansard is a gifted, emotive frontman who sings as if he must, with a heart on his sleeve that is constantly throbbing. Ms. Irglova is the embodiment of a harmonist, a supporting voice on the edge of the limelight whose feelings seem buried deep behind a smile of musical contentment. Those differences — or more personal issues, or pressures, of success, or the simple passage of time; they won’t say exactly — eventually ended the two-year romance at the end of last summer, but the collaboration continues with a new album, “Strict Joy” (Anti-), due on Oct. 27.

While the “Once” soundtrack was a thing of frail beauty, “Strict Joy” is a more ambitious, eclectic effort, recorded in Bridgeport, Conn., at the home studio of the producer Peter Katis; the Frames, Mr. Hansard’s longtime band, made significant musical contributions. It skips from the funky, groove-driven “Low Rising,” with a big ensemble sound, to the spare, piano-driven “Fantasy Man,” with a lush orchestral production that reflects Mr. Katis’s work with the National.

“When we started making the record in August, they had just broken up, but there was surprisingly little weirdness,” Mr. Katis said. “I didn’t even know they had broken up until we were pretty far along, partly because they get along so well.”

The single “Low Rising” is getting airplay on KCRW-FM, the public radio station in Southern California. “I like the new record a lot,” said Jason Bentley, music director at KCRW and host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic.” “They deal in a very personal, intimate world with songs that cut pretty close to the heart. It’s some pretty heavy stuff, and it must be difficult to put out there, but I think a lot of listeners are going to connect with it.”

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Ms Irglova and Mr. Hansard with their band, the Swell Season, at the 2008 Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee.Credit
Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Last month Mr. Hansard and Ms. Irglova stopped in New York to showcase the record sans band at the 92YTriBeCa. Whatever has passed between them only seemed to add texture to their collaboration. While some of the new songs clearly trace the wages of love and loss — “In These Arms,” “Feeling the Pull” and “I Have Loved You Wrong” — there was no awkwardness or hesitation, just a palpable warmth. After a few songs Mr. Hansard began playing solo, and Ms. Irglova, instead of heading backstage, stepped down from the stage, sitting rapt as he played.

“I think they are still together,” someone nearby leaned in and said.

They are, just not in that way. The best of their duets leaven drama with a kind of grace, a balance that weaves loss with hope. They seem made to sing together.

In August Ms. Irglova sat for an interview in the lobby of the Maritime Hotel in New York, with Mr. Hansard joining an hour later. They had not seen each other in a while and arrived from different places. Mr. Hansard spent a month with the actor Ed Norton in Kenya, where Mr. Norton works with the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust. Mr. Hansard is peripatetic to a fault, a rover who grabs at every situation with both hands. He has an Irish gift for conversation but evinces sincerity rather than blarney. Ms. Irglova had just gotten in from Dublin, near where she now lives. When Mr. Hansard walked in, he dropped a tender kiss on her forehead but did not linger, quickly taking his seat.

Pop music is full of post-romantic collaborations. Richard and Linda Thompson made a record and toured together after they broke up, and a significant part of Fleetwood Mac’s oeuvre derives from interband romance gone awry. But calling “Strict Joy” a breakup record makes Ms. Irglova, whose mien usually ranges from beatific to jolly, turn very serious.

“I just want to be clear,” she said, turning toward a reporter and speaking slowly so she would be understood, her accent reflecting her time in Dublin as much as her roots in Czechoslovakia. “As much as it may be called a breakup album, which I’m totally fine with, we made it according to what we believe it should be made as. If I was torn up about the way things had happened and the way things have gone on and turned out to be, it probably would feel very hard to deal with. But our core connection has always been friendship and the music.”

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Mr. Glen Hansard and Ms. Irglova at the Oscars in 2008.Credit
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

“Like Glen always puts it, you live your life, and the residue of that life you lead becomes the music,” she said, adding, “The same way it turned from friends to lovers, it somehow managed to turn the other way around at the end of it, which I’m delighted about because I’d hate for it to be drama.”

There is very little sadness visible between them as they interact, but the songs from “Strict Joy” seem to have been formed in the crucible of some fairly dramatic moments. Near the end of the show in TriBeCa, Ms. Irglova stepped up to the microphone to sing “Fantasy Man”:

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As Mr. Hansard talked about what it was like to record together after their split, he suggested that as artists and collaborators, going right at what had transpired between them gave them a way to work through it.

“The idea being that when you go into the darkness and you sing about your sadness and you sing about your loss,” he said, “you really sing about it, actually the truth of your blues. Ultimately, when that is played back, it can only bring good.”

Colm Mac Con Iomaire, a member of the Frames and now of the Swell Season, and a friend of Mr. Hansard’s for nearly 25 years, said the personal history between Ms. Irglova and Mr. Hansard brought “an added dimension” to the album. “To say that there weren’t tempestuous moments would be a lie, but sometimes you need that spark, that friction, for really good work,” he said.

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Ms. Irglova and Mr. Hansard in a scene from Once.Credit
Fox Searchlight Pictures

At the showcase Mr. Hansard read from “Strict Care, Strict Joy,” a poem by the Irish writer James Stephens that serves as both a title and a thematic undergirding for the record:

Caring for grief he cared his grief away:

And those sad songs, tho’ woe be all the theme,

Do not make us grieve who read them now —

Because the poet makes grief beautiful.

It sounds dark and mysterious, but the show was marked by fun, goofiness even. Mr. Hansard had forgotten his tuner and was using his recently acquired iPhone to tune the battered guitar with a giant hole in it that is a star of “Once.” Singalongs, which don’t usually play well in Manhattan, broke out on many songs.

The record reflects not just a couple in transition, but a sound as well. After quitting school to perform on the streets of Dublin, in 1990, Mr. Hansard formed the Frames, which developed a cult following and has been his musical home for two decades. With the explosion of “Once” he was at a crossroads. He chose to take the middle way, asking his longtime band mates to join the Swell Season and tour. The band, which had been Mr. Hansard on guitar with Ms. Irglova on piano and collaborators on strings, now has a much larger sound.

Mr. Mac Con Iomaire said that the Frames were ready to play for broader audiences, even if under a different rubric. “At this point it’s sort of family, and we are a pair of comfortable slippers for him to put on,” he said. “You have to remember that Glen is an overnight success who was 20 years in the making, and I think he took a real delight in sharing it with people he knows and trusts.”

The tendency to share both good fortune and misery has been at the core of Mr. Hansard’s music since he began busking on Grafton Street in Dublin. At the showcase, as Mr. Hansard introduced “I’m Moving On,” a song he had written just the night before, he said he likes trafficking in very personal things because when you write songs, “the truth has a habit of falling out of your mouth.”

In this case it happened fairly quickly. “The usual thing, I guess, would be taking some time apart and not seeing each other,” Ms. Irglova said. “And yet, we’ve had the music together, so somehow we’ve been forced to just get over ourselves and whatever struggles we might have. We just locked into that friendship thing and continue to love each other in an unconditional way.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2009, on Page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Romance Fades, Partnership Endures. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe